Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley has long favored giving the service chiefs an “intimate” role in acquisition programs and plans to lay that opinion out for the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) next week.
Milley will be joined Jan. 25 by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh in testifying before SASC on the role of the service chiefs in acquisition.
Service chiefs ought to have more say on the development and progress of service-specific acquisition efforts, Milley said Jan. 21 at a breakfast hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army outside Washington, D.C.
The 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), beginning in fiscal year 2017, places milestone decision authority for new-start programs spearheaded by a single service in the hands of that service’s acquisition executive rather than the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
“For a long time, I have believed that whoever was the chief of staff should play a very significant role in the acquisition process and should be involved in every step of the way,” Milley said. “Chiefs haven’t previously made decisions, essentially, on Milestone A or Milestone B or this particular step or that step of the process. That will change under this NDAA. The chief of staff of each respective service is going to be intimately involved in the programs all along the way.”
The NDAA also gives service chiefs and secretaries a larger role in the acquisition process. Under the new rules, those officials would have to sign off on performance, cost and technical tradeoffs after a program achieves Milestone A and B. Service chiefs must also approve changes to program requirements.
Milley has tasked he Army G-8, which coordinates the service’s funding, equipment and fielding efforts with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to establish a plan of attack for the Army as it adopts this new authority. The task of the G-8 and the Army staff is to “take a step back here and in light of the NDAA, what internal processes and procedures would we need to do?” Milley said.
Unit commanders whose soldiers will be using the equipment in combat also will be brought to the table during requirements generation, development and fielding, Milley said. Ultimately, Milley wants to free the Army from the existing sluggish, overly bureaucratic acquisition system to allow the service more agility in buying weapons and gear.
“As we perceive changes…we want to have the agility, from a process standpoint, to be able to turn off, turn on, change direction, of programs with industry very, very quickly. We want to be much more nimble. Our processes today, and this is one of the things the NDAA is trying to fix, are cumbersome, are slow and linear,” he said. “There are piles upon piles of paperwork…We want to work towards reducing, streamlining and get rid of a lot of the bureaucracy in order to increase speed, increase agility, which result in the responsiveness of the best equipment to the soldiers and getting it to them in a timely manner.”